Interesting day. The inevitable happened late yesterday and I was finally moved out of the private office I’ve had since going to work at ODOT and am now in “the pit” area with another PIO and an intern. In other words, no office door to close for privacy during lunch. It’s no big deal. I like the other PIO and both our interns … but I miss that hour of privacy at lunch.

Some unexpected e-mail and calls came in today. One was about some freelance work for someone I used to work with but have never worked for, another about teaching at Francis Tuttle Technology Center … and the others I’ll only mention if they pan out. We’ll see. Teaching at Francis Tuttle is a long shot. I’d love to do it, but I’m already committed for three classes at the new South OKC campus of Moore Norman Technology Center this fall.

My oldest daughter has decided she wants to be a TV chef when she grows up. She’s 11 now. She’s taken to preparing dinner and having it ready (or close) when I get home with the little kids. Who knows if she’ll stick with it, but I’ll sure let her cook for as long as it lasts.

No copies of Shara yet. Probably a few more days. I figure Scrybe had the books delivered to them from the printer so he could repackage the 50 hardcovers and provide return postage rather than having the printer ship copies to me. It hasn’t appeared on Amazon.com yet, either. Many thanks to everyone who has already pre-ordered from Shocklines!

Editing of Ulrik continues, though slowly. Not much time to work on it now that it’s at this stage. When I have the time, work goes pretty quickly. My laptop is acting up, so I’m pretty much locked into editing at the home desktop, and it’s hard to do that with four bored kids in the house.

I’ve taken up another project during my lunch hour. My fourth completed novel was called The Fetch and it’s probably the best idea of my pre-Shara novels. It deals with astral projection. I’ve taken to reworking it at lunch, adding some elements of gnosticism and, I hope, cleaning up some really bad writing. I finished the first chapter today, and it was quite bad. I wrote it about …. 15 years ago, I guess. Back when Levi’s 501 button-fly jeans were still cool. I’m modernizing it, getting rid of info-dumps, and my old nemesis, “He began to walk…” Why I kept saying that instead of “He walked…” is beyond me. My characters were always beginning to do something instead of just doing it. I still catch myself doing that sometimes. Anyhoo, I think I can clean The Fetch up and have a decent novel of it.

Useless trivia: The first time I ever used the name Ulrik for a character was in The Fetch. That will, of course, be changed as I rewrite the book.

That’s enough for today.